About the Book
Declining access to fresh water is one of the twenty-first century's most pressing environmental and human rights challenges, yet the struggle for water is not a new cause. The 8,800-kilometer border dividing Canada and the United States contains more than 20% of the world's total freshwater resources, and Border Flows traces the century-long effort by Canada and the United States to manage and care for their ecologically and economically shared rivers and lakes. Ranging across the continent, from the Great Lakes to the Northwest Passage to the Salish Sea, the histories in Border Flows offer critical insights into the historical struggle to care for these vital waters. From multiple perspectives, the book reveals alternative paradigms in water history, law, and policy at scales from the local to the transnational. Students, concerned citizens, and policymakers alike will benefit from the lessons to be found along this critical international border.
Table of Contents:
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Negotiating Abundance and Scarcity: Introduction to a Fluid Border
- Lynne Heasley and Daniel Macfarlane
- Part One
- Finding the Border: Political Ecologies of Water Governance and Tenure
- Openings: Political Ecologies on the Border
- Dave Dempsey
- A Citizen's Legal Primer on the Boundary Waters Treaty, International Joint Commission, and Great Lakes Water Management
- Noah D. Hall and Peter Starr
- Treaties, Wars, and Salish Sea Watersheds: The Constructed Boundaries of Water Governance
- Emma S. Norman and Alice Cohen
- Contesting the Northwest Passage: Four Far-North Narravies
- Andrea Charron
- Part Two
- Constructing the Border: Hydropolitics, Nationalism, and Maegaprojects
- Openings: Transboundary Power Flows
- Matthew Evendeen
- Quebec's Water Export Schemes: The Rise and Fall of a Resource Development Idea
- FrÉdÉric Lasserre
- Engineering a Treaty: The Negotiation of the Columbia River Treaty of 1961/1964< br> Jeremy Mouat
- Part Three
- Challenging the Border: Ecological Agents of Change
- Openings: Border Ecologies in Boundary Waters
- James W. Feldman
- Lines that Don't Divide: Telling Tales about Animals, Chemicals, and People in the Salish Sea
- Resiliency and Collapse: Lake Trout, Sea Lamprey, and Fisheries Management in Lake Superior
- Nancy Langston
- Part Four
- Reflections in the Water
- Openings: The Lakes at Night
- Jerry Dennis
- Finding Our Place
- Crossings
- Jeremy Mouat
- Meditations on Ice
- Colin A.M. Duncan and Andrew Marcille
- Bordering on Significance?
- Daniel Macfarlane
- To Market, to Market
- Joseph E. Taylor III
- Leading Waters
- Noah D. Hall
- On Frames, Perspectives, and Vanishing Points
- Lynne Heasley
- Headwaters of Hope
- Dave Dempsey
- Afterword
Keeping Up the Flow
- Graeme Wynn
- Further Reading
- Contributions
- Index
About the Author :
Lynne Heasley is an Associate Professor with the Department of History and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at Western Michigan University. Her research examines the intersections and complex problems of ecology, economics, and culture in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence basin. She is the author of A Thousand Pieces of Paradise: Landscape and Property in the Kickapoo Valley. Lynne Heasley is an Associate Professor with the Department of History and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at Western Michigan University. Her research examines the intersections and complex problems of ecology, economics, and culture in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence basin. She is the author of A Thousand Pieces of Paradise: Landscape and Property in the Kickapoo Valley. Frédéric Lasserre is a professor of Geography at Laval University, Directeur du Centre Québécois d'Ãtudes géopolitiques and a research associate at Groupe d'études et de recherche sur l'Asie contemporaine. Daniel Macfarlane is an assistant professor in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at Western Michigan University. Graeme Wynn is a professor of historical geography at the University of British Columbia and editor of BC Studies. He is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Canada and lives in Vancouver. Daniel Macfarlane is an assistant professor in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at Western Michigan University.
Review :
This collection of thoughtful essays by an impressive group of expert contributors examines separation and inter-action along the aquatic borders, boundaries, and borderlands shared by Canada and the United States. How distinct jurisdictions as neighbours at various political levels have and will con-tinue to face common challenges makes this volume a valuable record of aquatic envi-ronmental history and a source of insights into the future of water, aptly described by the editors as âa fundamental environmental and moral concern of the twenty-first century.â -Jamie Benidickson, Faculty of Law and Centre for Environmental Law and Global Sustainability, University of Ottawa
These impressive essays penetrate many dualisms-abundance and scarcity, Canada and the U.S., local and regional, science and humanities, and geography and history to name a few. The accomplished authors provide both rich details and expansive views of the transborder territory and illuminate both the shared and dissimilar interests of the two principal political entities, while exposing the mutual concerns that float atop the border-defying and fluid topic of water. Riding the rapids of a tumultuous subject, the contributors make sense of the highly contentious and complex issues for academic and lay readers alike. -Craig E. Colten, Carl O. Sauer Professor, Department of Geography & Anthropology, Louisiana State University
Reading this book was like taking a boundary waters canoe trip with experienced guides narrating the landscape and humanityâs place in it. They taught me about lakes, fish, and flora; law, politics, and prejudice; photographs, fish-buying, and ice-sail-ing. In the evening after dinner, around the campfire, these boundary waters guides spoke from their hearts about their love of nature and longing for a just world in the final section of the book entitled âFinding Our Place.â It was inspiring and enjoyable. I heartily recommend the journey. -Paul Hirt, Professor of History and Sustainability, Arizona State University
"....This book presents close analyses of this paradox, as experienced in the waters and landscapes of the border regions of Canada and the United States. The editors, both at Western Michigan University, have brought together in this nicely constructed volume an international cast of historians and other scholars....". Bocking, S. (2018)
Border Flows demonstrates the value of reaching across ideological and methodological boundaries that divide academic disciplines . . . the editors' keen sense for organization and the myriad conceptual connections that reach across each section, link this collection of articles to a larger aquatic context. This book will appeal to students and scholars from a wide variety of academic backgrounds and will serve as an excellent text for courses in legal history, environmental history, foreign relations, and borderlands studies. This edited collection represents a fine addition to the historiography of borders and water. - Erik Reardon, Canadian Journal of History
